Emblem
by Orifiel
Summary: Vault Boy is the iconic mascot of the Vault-Tec Corporation, known throughout the centuries for his helpful and cheery image in Vault-Tec propaganda. But what if there was a darker story behind that eternal smile?


**Warning(s):** Mentions of child abuse and adult suicide, character POV criticism on the foster care system, and depictions of the possible consequences of radical pro-life actions.

**A/N:** _Pre-War AU_. This attempts to tackle and combine the potential origin of a mascot character and a real world issue I had a recent discussion about. I know I mentioned several times that I wouldn't be posting any more video game fics on this account outside my main _Fallout_ series, but I feel that this one fits better here than on my secondary profile.

x-x-x-x-x

**(June 2074)**

"Vault 112 has completed all construction, sir," Joanne Strausser announced in an unsteady voice, her low-heeled pumps clicking on the linoleum floor as she strode into the immaculate office. "Most of the Vaults are now on standby, with the exception of a few in New England. We're still sorting out the subjects for the Vaults around the Commonwealth."

Giles Wolstencroft nodded, barely sparing the public relations executive a glance as he remained fixated on his computer terminal. "Thank you. I'll send word up the chain."

She paused before wandering farther inside and coming to a stop beside his desk. "Are you, uh… are you still looking into that suicide outside Vault 76 last week?"

He ran a hand through his graying hair and turned from the monitor to reprimand her for loitering in his office. But when he noticed the pallid color of her face, he said instead, "No… I'm working on commissioning an artist to design a Vault-Tec mascot. CEO's orders. As his assistant, I can't refuse the task, mind-numbing as it may be. By the way, what's wrong? You don't look well."

Joanne swallowed and attempted an airy laugh, which only ended in a hoarse wheezing sound. "There's something else. I… I have a holotape for you, sir."

His brow creased as he took the small device she handed to him. "From whom? It's not a corporate matter, is it?"

She shook her head vehemently, clutching her clipboard to her chest. "No. It's… from the suicide victim."

Giles tensed and then glared at her. "What?"

"The investigative team we sent out there found it next to his body. And see, it's addressed to you on the label."

"What is the meaning of this?" he demanded, shoving the holotape into the corresponding drive on his computer.

Both Vault-Tec personnel froze when an image of a masked blond man appeared on the terminal. The metal construct in the distance behind him appeared to be the entrance of Vault 76, although with the dark picture quality, Giles couldn't be sure. He leaned closer to the screen as the man adjusted his clothing, which consisted of a jumpsuit similar to the Vault-issued design.

"_Mr. Wolstencroft, you don't know me now, but I guess you knew me back then,"_ the man stated to the camera, his voice filtered through the heavy duty gas mask._ "Before I was even born. Because that's why I'm even here."_

Giles glowered in confusion, but Joanne sent him a wary glance.

"What is this guy talking about?" she asked. "Sir… who were you before you came to work for Vault-Tec?"

Giles shushed her as he strained to listen to the rest of the message.

"_I want to tell you a little of who I am, Mr. Wolstencroft. What I turned out to be," _the man continued._ "And what I never will be."_

A slight chill permeated the office at that moment, and Giles couldn't help the foreboding feeling that seeped into his gut as the footage continued.

"_I spent my entire life as a ward of the state after I was abandoned in an alleyway dumpster at six weeks old. I grew up in foster care when I wasn't living at the orphanage. That system seems acceptable on the outside, especially when nationwide focus is on looming nuclear wars instead of domestic issues like orphaned kids, but I have firsthand experience of what that life is really like._

_I was two when I was sent to my first foster family, the Santangelos. They were probably the most decent people I've lived with even though they decided to send me back after they finally conceived their own child. I ended up staying at the orphanage for two more years without any prospects. I was the only child under the age of five who had never been considered for adoption._

_You see, I was born with a neuromuscular disease in my face that twists my features into a permanent grin. It can be unsettling to those who don't know, and some people did find me creepy. Some pitied me. Some laughed at me._

_Others beat me._

_You know how most kids' first words are either 'mommy,' 'daddy,' or even 'hello'? My first learned word was 'help.' My second was 'stop.' My first conscious emotion was fear._

_I had to undergo surgery for a skull fracture on my fifth birthday because some of the older wards wanted to 'fix my face.' I don't remember any of it, but I learned later on that the incident involved hammers and metal baseball bats._

_And through it all, because of my muscle disorder, I smiled._

_After I recovered from my surgery, I went to live with the Gannon family. They were snobby, privileged elites who put up with my early behavioral problems for a long time, even when I thought it was okay to smother their infant son for fun, because that was what the other kids did to me at the orphanage. I didn't understand right and wrong, and I guess to this day I still don't._

_Do you?_

_Mr. and Mrs. Gannon eventually sent me off to another foster family because I was turning out to be a 'difficult' child. I fit right in with the Montgomerys, trailer trash no one else cared about. Mr. Montgomery taught me how to take a punch on his drunken nights. Mrs. Montgomery taught me how to please a woman every other night. There were several lessons._

_And when Mr. Montgomery found out about that last part, he taught me how he could please himself by using me._

_The pain and shame never completely go away, especially when you're violated like that at eleven years old._

_But through everything, I had no choice but to smile._

_I learned fast to keep my mouth shut and to take my issues out on my peers. I couldn't even begin to count how many kids I beat to a pulp just by following my foster father's example. But at least then no one would mess with me. If people had a problem with my face, they wouldn't dare let me know. Not unless they had a death wish._

_The Montgomerys kept me and the government checks until I turned thirteen, when social services took me away after finding out what was happening inside that filthy trailer. I left with six broken bones that never healed right, a violent reputation, a penchant for promiscuity, a smoking addiction…_

_And a smile._

_Next up was the DeLoria family. They weren't much better, but at least I could look my own reflection in the eye again. The parents were both stoners and criminally neglectful. That was fine with me. It gave me plenty of chance to move in on their daughter._

_This girl was older than me by a few years, and she thought I was retarded because of my facial expression. I proved her wrong by forcing her down one night and taking her virginity. What? The bitch had it coming. Women are just objects that don't get to choose for themselves, right?_

_That's something you'd agree on, isn't it?_

_I was fifteen when she told me she was pregnant. Before I could laugh at the irony—my kid would probably end up in the foster care system just like me—she told me she wasn't sure who the father was. Not a smart thing to say._

_We never did find out for sure who the father was because I hit her so many times that she miscarried._

_And I did it while smiling._

_The DeLorias booted my ass back to the orphanage so fast that I wondered if I'd imagined the whole thing. Not so, because I was hanging out in the courtyard one day when the other possible father—some unhinged college guy—walked up to the other side of the fence, pulled out a pistol, and shot me in the chest._

_I spent four months in the hospital; two weeks in an induced coma, another month trying not to die, and the rest of the time recuperating after I pulled through by some perverse miracle. Once I was on my feet again, I ran off. Disappeared. Never went back to that fucking system. And no one looked for me, either. If they did, they didn't look in the right places._

_Because at age sixteen, I was working the street corners of the closest metropolis._

_Keeping my face covered was my selling point. I'd only been with a handful of girls before then, so I was winging it from my previous experiences, but my clients loved the whole mystery thing. Men, women, I agreed to them all. I didn't give a shit about my body at that point. As long as the cash kept rolling in, and I had my stash of booze, cigarettes, and drugs, I was set._

_Around that time was when I had my first real relationship. You could say she was my coworker because she serviced the same clients I did. She'd claimed to be a lesbian outside the job, but she obviously made an exception for me, so I wasn't complaining. She was beautiful, laidback, and… surreal. I'd never met anyone like her._

_I never knew if it was her real name, but she went by Cassidy._

_And when I was with her, I couldn't stop smiling even if I wanted to._

_Time went by, and we had our problems. We were on and off for over a year because when you're living a life of substance abuse and prostitution, nothing is ever stable. And when you're someone like me, anything remotely good that happens to you is just an illusion._

_I contracted some kind of virus from Cass when I was eighteen. I would have believed I'd been infected by anyone other than her, but she confessed to knowing about having it when I got sick from a compromised immune system. I never got better. Not in my body, my head, or my heart._

_But still I smiled._

_Even when I found out I'd have the virus for life. Even when Cass broke up with me for good._

_And even when she turned me in to the police to save her own skin during a ring bust._

_My first arrest led to serving time in prison for a bunch of counts the authorities managed to dig up on my history. I'd never cared about my origins before that point, but when I learned that I basically turned out to be the exact replica of my birth mother, I had a mental breakdown so out of control that they moved me to a psychiatric hospital instead._

_The doctors diagnosed me with a list of personality and mood disorders, tried to clean me up, and put me through half a dozen rehab programs until I could fake recovery from violence and addictions. Suckers. I walked out of that damn place as fucked up in the head as ever. Only now I could hide it better._

_Didn't take long for me to get back to my self-destructive spiral, poisoning a body that was already shutting down, anyway. I haven't bothered with relationships since Cass. I haven't bothered with anything the rest of you people would call worthwhile. I thought I'd already hit rock bottom, but I swear I felt the true impact when I decided to look into my birth._

_I've been researching it ever since and smiling against my will along the way._

_I'm sure you're wondering by now why some stranger wearing a gas mask is even telling you all this. There's a point, believe me._

_All my research led me to your name, Giles Wolstencroft. When I found out who you were, I knew I had to get into contact with you. I hear you're some big shot corporate employee now, but you were someone else before. Some people called you a savior and a hero for your work. Speaking as someone your work affected, I'd call you something else._

_A monster._

_You see, you met my birth mother, whoever she was. Some druggie-hooker who got knocked up on the streets. She had no money, no education, and sure as hell no clue how to raise a kid. She was going to do the only responsible thing in her life, and that was to get an abortion. But that was where you came in._

_You and your fucking pro-life, anti-choice group._

_Surprised that this is swinging over to you? I looked into your organization. Your methods were hostile and aggressive, and you terrorized her every time she tried to visit the clinic. You think you gave her knowledge? Hope? Enlightenment? No._

_All you did was take away her choice._

_Well congratulations. You got your way and I was born. But that's where you thought your role ended. After you 'saved a life,' you considered your job done. What pisses me off the most were all your group's empty arguments about how abortion is murder and how adoption is an answer. You were so caught up in your own self-righteous bullshit that you never considered what happens next._

_Reality is different from your fucking expectations._

_Like I mentioned before, I was never in the running for adoption even when I was an infant. I was the biological son of a crazy drug addict whore, and I've heard adoptive couples say they don't want that 'bad blood' in their homes. So this 'bad blood' was stuck in the foster care system. A ward of the state._

_And now you know how that turned out. The life you 'saved' was born with a neuromuscular disease because the mother had already destroyed her health by the time she got pregnant. I went through high risk surgeries twice before I even reached adulthood, both as a result of violent attacks meant to kill me. I was abused and raped as a kid because hardly anyone gives a fuck about foster children's welfare. I became an alcoholic, a smoker, and a drug user before I learned basic algebra. The only person I ever cared about gave me a sexually transmitted virus that's slowly killing me to this day. These experiences warped me so badly that I'm beyond help, and it came full circle when I turned out to be a druggie-hooker, just like my mom._

_This is the life you fought and advocated so hard for?_

_Then let me ask you this, hero: Are unwanted pregnancies really better off carried out than terminated? You went on your soapbox about how fetuses deserve a chance to live like anyone else, so where the hell were you after you demanded my birth?_

_As far as I'm concerned, you're no better than the killer my mother would have been._

_Because I've never been alive. All you did was extend the suffering I went through in this shithole of a society. So yeah, thanks a lot._

_Maybe now you know why you shouldn't rob women of their choice. You never had a fucking clue what it was like to be in her position, or how it would have turned out to be in mine. It was never your place to open your mouth and pressure a woman you didn't even know into something she didn't want._

_You cried murder at babies being aborted, but never gave a flying fuck about our fates once we came into the world. How is that justice?_

_And here's the punchline. That gigantic thing behind me is one of your corporation's Vaults, isn't it? I applied for a spot in fifty Vaults across the country, and I was rejected from each one because of my background and the state of my health. So in the event of a nuclear war, I'm just going to have to wait around on the surface to get nuked._

_Even now, after everything your actions have done to me, you and whatever organization you work for still can't make it right._

_Well, Mr. Wolstencroft, I'm going to do what you and my birth mother failed to do at the beginning. I'd say I'm through with going on like this, but the truth is that I've always been dead._

_You didn't save shit._

_See this pistol? I'm going to use it to make a statement in front of that Vault door back there. Just something to remember me by since I don't even have a name to leave behind."_

The man reached up and removed his gas mask, revealing the grotesque grin locked across the skin of his face.

"_And I'm going to do it with a smile."_

The screen went black as the footage cut off.

It took Giles several seconds before he noticed the trembling in his hands. He stared wide-eyed at his reflection in the monitor, at a complete loss for words as the man's features and morbid account burned permanently into his memory. In his peripheral vision, he saw Joanne wobble and steady herself against the edge of the desk.

"That was certainly some story," she remarked unevenly, adjusting her spectacles. "I don't really know what to make of it, but it does explain that influx of reservation requests we got over the past few months. We had to turn them all down because his conditions disqualified him from all the Vault experiments."

Giles leaned back in his seat and steepled his fingers together, contemplating. "Hm."

Joanne watched him for a long while. "Sir, he seemed to hold you responsible for his misfortune… and even his existence. If I may be so bold, was there any truth to his accusations?"

A few beats went by before the answer came. "Yes."

The PR executive's eyebrows shot to her hairline. "Really?"

"Before I came to Vault-Tec, I was the president of a major pro-life organization that operated through harsh procedures. I just… like he said, I never thought about what would happen when those unwanted children became wards of the state," Giles admitted, rubbing his forehead wearily. "I haven't been involved with that issue since I switched to this career, so you can imagine how unnerving it is to learn of one result of my past activism."

Joanne nodded and fidgeted with her clipboard. "Well, if everything he said was true, you can't help feeling sorry for him. Sad, isn't it, how he and others like him make perfect social experiments without even being grouped into the Vaults? It just shows you how cruel this world can be. A nuclear war wouldn't change anything; it would just alter the environment to reflect what we already are."

Giles inclined his head in silent agreement. Even if he'd still retained his rigorous viewpoint on the pro-life versus pro-choice matter, coming face to face with a tragedy like that would have been enough to stagger him. While it likely wasn't an isolated case, the knowledge that he'd had a direct hand in setting that man's life experiences into motion left an unpleasant sensation in his chest. And even though he was now willingly working for a corporation that intended to use unsuspecting people as social experiments during an impending world war, only the holotape of this suicide victim's final moments roused a degree of guilt within him.

Suddenly, an idea came to mind.

"Say, Joanne. That Vault-Tec mascot I mentioned? I think we have our design," Giles declared, steeling himself as he rewound the holotape and paused it at the last few frames showing the man's face.

"Him?" Joanne inquired shrilly.

"There is nothing I can do for him now. It's unfortunate that he went through everything he did and took himself out in the end," Giles told her, forcing himself to gaze into the haunted black eyes on the screen. "But may he live on as the face of Vault-Tec."

"Are you sure, sir?"

"Get me in contact with our affiliated artists. We'll have him drawn as a cartoon, dressed in a proper Vault-Tec jumpsuit. He'll be on all our pamphlets, flyers, introduction videos. We couldn't accept him into the Vaults, but we can preserve his image as a representation of humanity."

Joanne hesitated. "Sir, isn't that a bit… disrespectful? I mean, wouldn't it just end up as a mockery?"

Giles sent her a grim look. "Indeed, because no matter what I do to try to redeem myself, it will always come out as a mockery. Even if my intentions are to honor him." He studied the taut stretch of the man's mouth, identifying the tension around the lips that signified a desperation to erase the perpetual grin. "Whatever artist decides to take on this design, I want them to draw this man with an authentic smile. It's a useless detail, but it's the only happiness I can ever hope to offer him. The only thing I can make up to him."

"All right. I'll also call the lead artist of Hubris Comics. They may be interested in this project," Joanne said, scribbling several notes on her clipboard. "By the way, since he has no name, what should we call him?"

Giles glanced at the screen again. The Vault entrance loomed in the background, mere moments before it became the blond man's final resting place. Giles had brought that unfortunate soul into the world. It was only fitting that he be the one to give him an identity. Even if only as an emblem that would live on forever.

"Vault Boy."

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**A/N:** Regarding the subject, I had been in a discussion about some aspects of the foster care and adoption systems as well as the pro-life vs. pro-choice debate. I challenged myself to apply it to the _Fallout_ fandom, and a pre-War scenario is what I came up with. As a disclaimer, nothing in this story necessarily reflects my personal viewpoints on the matter. I wrote it strictly as a fictional but viable account of an individual's tragic experiences as a ward of the state.


End file.
